Formerly the Rhino Report

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A quick viddy from an old TV movie version of “Brave New World” from 1998 to begin the proceedings. The viddy’s sound is not synced properly.

I’ve really got nothing today, more because I am calling it an early night and want to concentrate on getting a job than anything else. I’ll get to the Harry Reid race thing, Sarah Palin gets a job (can I be far behind?) and other stories that distract rather than illuminate tomorrow. Just a few pieces of fine art and a few quotes for today sounds like a plan.

First up, Hieronymus Bosch

Next up, a personal favorite U-kiyo-e piece of mine, from Katsushika Hokusai:

The last one an ancient sculpture of the historical/mythical figure Gilgamesh:

Gilgamesh was an actual king of Sumer(modern day Euphrates valley) credited with having built the walls of Uruk. The “mythological” part comes from the book “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, which says he was 2/3 god and 1/3 man. He was said to have fought with demons, and dealt with the wrath of the goddess Ishtar, and crossed over to the netherworld to avoid death, a journey brought about when his best friend, Enkidu, dies.

I’ve read the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is one helluva book, and it has, among other things, the story of the flood in it. A story which predate the Bible flood story by 1,500 years. Read the book.

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That’s about it, except for a second viddy. An interview with Aldous Huxley

Today’s Nuggets, by Aldous Huxley, via wikiquote: It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. … Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.